Lucifer (Vampires in America: The Vampire Wars Book 11)

by D. B. Reynolds

  “Welcome to the new world, Eleanor darling. You’re mine now.”

  She twisted around at the sound of Derek’s voice. What the hell was he . . .? Horror dawned as she felt the pull of his mastery over her. It made her want to drop to her knees and beg him to use her . . . again.

  Oh my God, had she done that? Had she begged Derek to fuck her? What would Lucifer think? Would he understand?

  “Get up. I’ve got places to be, and you’re going with me.”

  She hated his voice, his smell, everything about him.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” she snarled. She forced herself to stand, ignoring the aches and pains, the soreness, the embarrassment of her nakedness. She might have made the stupidest mistake of her life, but she was still herself. And there was no way in hell she was letting Derek Pratt tell her what to do. “When Lucifer finds out what you did—”

  He laughed, the noise harsh against ears that were so much more sensitive than they’d been only a few hours ago. Like her eyes. Would it always be like this? Should it be? Was there something wrong with her?

  Derek grabbed her upper arms without warning. She tried to twist away, but he was too strong. Way too strong.

  “You think he’ll want you like this?” he mocked. “What good are you to him? You’re a vampire now, no longer his perfectly fuckable princess. Hell, you’re not even good for food anymore.”

  She told herself that Derek was lying, trying to hurt her even more than he already had. Or maybe it was Lucifer he was trying to hurt. Doubt teased the edges of her mind. But if that was true, if Derek had made her a vampire in order to wound Lucifer, then maybe he was telling the truth, taunting her with a new reality that she—and Lucifer—were helpless to change. Derek was an asshole, but he was also a vampire. He understood a vampire’s needs and preferences far better than she did.

  She thought back to the many nights she’d spent with Lucifer, and all the things they’d talked about. He’d told her about his life, about what it meant to be a vampire, and how it had changed everything for him. About how much he loved her humanity, how he fed from her during sex, and the erotic heights they’d soared together because of it.

  And she realized how all of that would change now.

  Her chest ached from too much anger, too much loss, and all of it fighting to get out, while she struggled to keep it contained. She wanted to scream her pain to the world. She wanted to kill fucking Derek Pratt, to stomp on his dying face until he was . . .

  Eleanor blinked in surprise at her own thoughts. Was this what it meant to be a vampire? These bloody, violent thoughts? She grabbed her head as if she could squeeze the images out, like juice from an orange. Her fingers tightened, yanking her hair until the sharp pain brought her back to earth.

  Across the room, Derek chuckled, amused by her agony, by the hell that he’d made her life. She eyed him darkly, dredging up the satisfying image of him bloody beneath her boot.

  As if he’d heard her thoughts, or maybe he’d simply read them on her face, he sobered. “Forget it, bitch. I’m your Sire now, and you can’t do a fucking thing to me.”

  Eleanor tipped her head, eyeing him appraisingly. She could feel the bond tying them together. He was right about that much. But the tie was fragile, and weak, just like Derek. She weighed their relative power without even knowing what she was doing, and found him lacking, and yet . . . . Something inside of her, some new perception she’d never possessed before tonight, told her she couldn’t kill Derek.

  But if she stayed, he’d use her. And she’d let him.

  She cursed. She had to run, to get as far away from Derek as possible before his hold on her grew any stronger. But even more, she had to leave town before Lucifer found her. Before she had to face him with what she’d become, to see the horror, the rejection in his eyes. She couldn’t survive that. She wouldn’t want to.

  Ignoring Derek’s increasingly strident demands, she gathered the pieces of her clothing that were scattered on the floor, then got dressed and shoved her way past him. She would have laughed at the shock on his face when she slammed him against the wall, but there was nothing funny about what was happening tonight. Her life was being ripped to shreds, minute by minute. She just had to hold on to the few fragments left long enough to get out of town, to go . . . she didn’t know where but somewhere had to be better than here.

  But first . . . oh God, the horrors just kept coming, because first, she had to eat.

  Present day, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

  “JESUS, ELLE,” LUCIFER breathed. “Why the fuck would you believe anything Pratt told you? When did I ever—”

  “I know,” she said, putting a hand over his mouth to stop him. “But I wasn’t thinking straight. You have to understand that, right? I was so confused by all the new sensations and feelings, and there was no one to explain anything. Derek only cared about sticking it to you. He wasn’t going to teach me anything. And I was so terrified, Luc.”

  “Baby, baby,” he murmured, hugging her tightly as if he could make it all go away. “I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. None of this was your fault. It was that asshole who started it, and then . . . I just panicked.”

  He rubbed his jaw against her hair in silent comfort.

  “It took me a week to stop running, another week to realize what I’d done. I knew you’d never have enlisted Derek to do anything much less make me a vampire. And if you’d somehow lost your mind, and had asked him, you’d never have left me to go through it alone.” She slid her arms around his rib cage, stroking up over his back to his shoulders, holding him against her. “But it was done. I couldn’t change that. And knowing how blind I’d been, knowing you’d never have gone along with it, only convinced me even more that you wouldn’t want me this way.” She shrugged. “I couldn’t face that. I was learning to cope with all the other shit, the hunger, the increased strength, enhanced senses . . . all of the new urges that wanted to dictate how I lived, what I thought. But the one thing I knew I could never survive was discovering you didn’t love me anymore.

  “So I just kept on running, until Lucien found me. It was pure chance that our paths crossed. Or at least as much pure chance as anything that happens to vampires. He was powerful and kind, and willing to teach a young, stupid vampire how to live without making a mess of it.”

  “Did he fuck you?” Lucifer growled, and his fingers dug into her hips.

  “Lucifer,” she chided. “What difference—”

  “Come on, Elle. Everyone knows that Lucien picked his vampires for their fuckability. And you’re a beautiful—”

  “So you’ve been celibate all these years? No lovers for the great Lucifer?”

  He narrowed his eyes at her in irritation. “It’s not the—”

  “If you tell me it’s not the same for men and women, I will geld you where you lie.”

  He laughed in genuine amusement, obviously not too terrified by the potential loss of his favorite body part. “You wouldn’t do that,” he murmured, sliding a hand down to cup her ass, holding her in place as he rubbed that very firm body part against her belly.

  “I might regret it,” she admitted.

  He smiled. “How’d you end up on Sophia’s security detail?”

  “Under Lucien—and don’t even go there—I was part of his security team, but that didn’t mean much under his rule. I think everyone knew how lax Lucien’s security was. It got him killed in the end, and—”

  “It got a lot of other vamps killed, too,” he interjected harshly.

  “I know,” she admitted, though it pained her. Lucien had been good to her, but he hadn’t been a good lord for his territory. “Anyway, when Sophia became the new lord, Colin took over her security. She didn’t have any staff of her own, and not even a single child. Colin was looking for a fem
ale bodyguard for Sophia, and he held a sort of tryout.”

  “And Murphy picked you.”

  “He didn’t pick me. I won the damn tryout by a mile. I’d been training for two decades by then. It started as a reaction to Derek. I was afraid he’d come for me—”

  “He was long dead by the time you met Lucien. You should have felt—”

  “I did feel something, but I didn’t know what it was. I was still running scared back then, and when the Sire/child connection between us was severed, I just chalked the feeling up to one more vampire sensation that I didn’t understand, and kept preparing myself to be ready when Derek came after me.

  “Anyway, after that, the security job came naturally. Vampires all have talents, and that was mine.”

  “Some of us have more than one,” he murmured, turning her in his arms to run a caressing hand over her body.

  “You didn’t get that talent from being a vampire.”

  He grinned. “True. But it has given me a very long time to improve my technique.”

  She sighed. Lucifer’s hand was a warm caress, rubbing up and down her back. It was so fucking soothing that she checked her awareness, wanting to be sure it was just physical, that he wasn’t manipulating her. But she’d no sooner had the thought than she recoiled. It was that kind of thinking that had made her run. Lucifer deserved better. He’d deserved it then, and he still did now.

  “After what Derek did, I couldn’t stand knowing that my mind wasn’t my own anymore,” she said quietly.

  “You should have come to me—”

  “You were a vampire,” she said simply. “Just like Derek—”

  “The fuck I was!”

  “I know, I know,” she murmured, kissing his neck in apology. “But I didn’t know then; I didn’t know anything. And by the time I learned enough to know better, I figured you’d have already moved on. You were so beautiful. There were always women—”

  “Was? So, I’m not beautiful anymore?” he grumbled.

  She slapped his amazing chest. “Stop that. You know exactly how good looking you are.”

  He made a self-deprecating moue with his lips, and she nearly laughed. But there were still things that needed to be said.

  “It left a mark,” she told him soberly. “Even once I discovered that not all vampires were like Derek. That, in fact, vampire law forbids changing a human without consent. Even after that, the idea of one of us slipping into another’s mind and learning their secrets, of making them tell you things they wouldn’t want you to know, secrets they haven’t even told their lovers...it makes me sick. Physically sick.”

  “I make you sick?”

  “No, no, no,” she said quickly. “Never. But it was difficult to get past that. It still is.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said, pulling back enough to see her face. “You’ve been Sophia’s close-in bodyguard for how long? A year at least, right?”

  “Just over that, yeah.”

  “You can’t tell me that she hasn’t interrogated anyone during that time, that there’ve been no enemy vamps coming at her, or challenges from her own people.”

  “Of course not, but—”

  “But what, Elle?” he asked, seeming genuinely puzzled. “Sophia uses kind persuasion instead? Or is it that someone else does her dirty work for her? Murphy’s not doing it, but maybe she has an interrogator, some truly medieval vamp—”

  “No!” she shouted. “No,” she repeated more calmly. “Most of the vampires who’ve challenged her weren’t anywhere near strong enough to defeat her. She was a complete unknown to the Canadian vamp community, and I think they confused her playgirl reputation with weakness.”

  “God knows why,” Lucifer said dryly. “She wasn’t any different than Lucien, and they followed him willingly enough.”

  “You don’t really need me to explain that, do you? Vampires are a total boys club, and Sophia doesn’t have a penis.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. She’s a stunning woman, and . . . and I think I’m finished with that thought,” he said, grinning down at her.

  “Uh huh. Anyway, her two biggest challengers came before I was brought on board. That was Darren Yamanaka, and, oddly enough, a vampire named Thierry Lavoie who was Master of Montreal when Sophia took over. She killed Lavoie.”

  “She should have killed Yamanaka. We wouldn’t be here right now if she had.” He frowned a moment, then said, “But then you and I wouldn’t be in this bed together, so I’m not complaining.”

  “Of course, if she had killed Darren, then Colin wouldn’t be enduring horrific torture every night either, but it’s good you have your priorities straight.”

  He shrugged, and Eleanor had to remind herself that Lucifer didn’t know Colin Murphy the way she did. He wasn’t personally invested in Colin’s well-being, other than as a general principle. It was cowardly to torture a vampire’s human mate in order to get what you wanted. And besides, in this case, the vampires holding Colin were colluding with the European invaders, which involved every vampire lord in North America, including Lucifer’s Aden.

  “So, you’re telling me you’ve never seen Sophia dig into a vampire’s brain? That hardly seems likely, given—”

  “No, of course, I have, but it’s not the vampires that bother me. It’s the humans. Sophia has almost nothing to do with humans, other than her own daytime staff, and Colin oversees all of the daytime people, from gardeners to security guards. He shields her from most of that.”

  “Another mistake, but beside the point.”

  She scowled. She was getting a clear picture that Lucifer didn’t think much of Sophia’s way of running her territory, and it was pissing her off.

  “Look, all I’m saying is that when you started digging into those humans’ brains—”

  “I don’t ‘dig,’ Elle. It’s much more subtle than that.”

  “Whatever. It brought back bad memories, okay? That’s all I’m saying.”

  He studied her for a long moment, then nodded. “Okay. I can understand that. But you have to understand that sometimes it’s necessary. Those humans had helped kidnap your friend Murphy, and they had information that I needed to find and rescue him. I could have used physical force. I could have tortured it out of them the way Murphy’s captors are doing him. But because of Murphy, I don’t have time for that. Besides, the humans I brain fuck never even know I was there. I’m just that good. And, frankly, I’m getting a little tired of being compared to that asshole Derek Pratt. I’m a fucking genius—a Mozart compared to Pratt’s one-year old pounding on a toy piano. You’re a vampire, Elle. You know what I am.”

  “I do,” she said, rubbing his chest soothingly. “And I know you, Luc. You’re a good man.”

  “Well, don’t tell anyone that. I have a rep to maintain.”

  “Your secret’s safe with me,” she said, laughing, but then she sighed. For a little while, this had been like old times. Back when they’d had nothing to do but love each other, they’d spend plenty of nights lying in bed like this, talking, making love, and then talking some more. Unfortunately . . .

  “We have to get up, you know,” Lucifer said, echoing her thoughts.

  “I know. What’s on the agenda for tonight?”

  “Well, first,” he murmured, rolling her under him and slipping his knee between her legs, “I’m going to make love to you.”

  Eleanor’s breath caught in her throat as his thigh pressed against her pussy. Such a careful touch, and such unbearable tension. His cock was hard against her thigh, firm and enticing, ready for action. And yet, he was making no move to spread her legs and slide that hard length inside her. Damn him.

  He seemed determined to drive her insane first, licking and kissing every inch of her, starting with her face—her eyes, her cheeks, a soft caress over
her lips. And then her neck, lingering over the pulse point of her carotid, his tongue pressed against her skin as if to feel the throbbing of her blood as it passed through the artery. Her heart nearly stopped when he closed his teeth over the soft spot of her neck, bringing back all those times he’d done the same when she’d been human, a knife’s edge of memory, so clear and so sharp. Warm, dark nights with Lucifer, making her feel beautiful, loved, cherished. And then the incredible passion of his bite, the hot rush of raw desire singeing every nerve, every muscle.

  Lucifer’s deep growl brought her back to the present, to the feel of his fangs closing over the soft ridge of her clavicle. “Do you think I can’t make you scream without the bite euphoric, Elle?” he demanded, guessing her thoughts with startling accuracy.

  Her eyes flashed open to see his glaring down at her, power gleaming in a golden light that limned his face and made him seem unreal, a beautiful temptation sent to lure her into hell. He held her gaze long enough for her to see the wicked gleam in their depths, and then his dark head bent over her breasts, and her heart nearly forgot how to beat.

  Lucifer’s mouth closed over a nipple, sucking hard enough to sting, letting his fangs graze over the delicate skin of her breast, before moving to the other breast and doing the same. He lifted his head and blew gently on the wet tips, watching her reaction, smiling at the hunger she couldn’t keep from her face, and then he abandoned her aching breasts to move downward. His mouth was a delicate torment as he kissed his way past her stomach, nibbling at her belly while he pushed her thighs open and she realized where he was going. She wanted to protest, to tell him she couldn’t stand it, that it had been too long, that no one had made her feel so damn much in all the years they’d been separated. But the words wouldn’t come. Because she wanted it, wanted him, more than her next breath. She’d missed him. All this time, she’d thought she was fine, that her past was just that. But she’d been a fool.

  The brush of a finger over her clit brought her back to the moment, this exquisite, tantalizing moment with the most beautiful man between her thighs, his breath hot against her wet pussy. He spread her swollen lips with his thumbs, his eyes still glowing with power as he studied her bare sex.